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| ELLIOTT CARTER with Daniel Barenboim and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall in 1994. |
I can't think of a more appropriate way to describe the cellist Yo-Yo Ma's brief involvement with Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto. Having had some experience with Carter's music in the past (he had played Carter's cello sonata brilliantly according to the composer), Ma must have had a pretty good idea of what to expect when he agreed to have a Carter concerto commissioned for him by the Chicago Symphony. And the initial perusal of the finished score should have been enough for a musician of Ma's caliber to decide if he finds the music attractive enough to invest time and effort in mastering its numerous challenges. Whatever went through Ma's head back then, he did learn the concerto, played the world premiere with the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim in September of 2001, then, a few weeks later, performed it again with the same forces at Carnegie Hall.
And that was it. As far as I know, Ma has not played the Carter concerto ever since.
Perhaps engagements to play this concerto weren't sufficiently lucrative compared to those where Ma could play the numbingly familiar crowd-pleasers (Schumann, Dvorak, Shostakovich) he had played for decades. Or maybe Ma decided that public performances of challenging modernist music were incompatible with his status as a beloved 'People's Cellist'. One thing I know is that Ma had no difficulties with the technical challenges posed by this concerto. I know this because one of Ma's performances was recorded for broadcast, and the recording documents a performance that is simply stunning not only for the ease and confidence with which Ma dispatches the solo part, but also for his (and Daniel Barenboim's) understanding that, despite its rhythmic complexities and non-tonal harmonic language, Carter's piece should be played as a modernist version of an emotionally turbulent Romantic concerto.
